History of the Royal Navy

Submarines

As recently as 2010, one historian has claimed that the Admiralty "studiously ignored the submarines for years" and had been "wont to ignore as dismiss as wasteful tinkering the underwater designs of inventors all over the world."[1] Such generalised slurs ignore the facts. Since the American Civil War, the Admiralty had, in the words of Dr. Nicholas Lambert, "generally kept itself well informed about submarine development".[2]